Google, Bing Both Win More Search Market Share

Another month and another new release of comScore search engine rankings for the U.S. for May 2013. Google and Bing are both up, while the other top search engines comScore tracks (Yahoo, Ask, AOL) were flat or saw declines.

Not surprisingly, Google led the way for search share in May, and grew its search market share to 66.7 percent, up from 66.5 percent in April. Google has the identical search share of 66.7 percent when comparing May 2012 and May 2013.

Bing grew to 17.4 percent in May, up from 17.3 percent in April. This is a significant increase from its 15.4 percent search market share in May 2012.

Meanwhile, Yahoo dropped slightly from 12 percent in April to 11.9 percent in May. Yahoo is down considerably from May 2012, when it had a 13.4 percent search market share.

This continues the trend of Microsoft’s Bing and Yahoo simply swapping search share rather than making inroads on Google’s massive search share.

Ask held steady at 2.7 percent from April to May, but AOL's search market share fell to 1.3 percent, down from 1.5 percent. AOL's search market share has only been this low one other time, when it previously hit this record low in August 2011.

When looking at the 20 billion search queries conducted in May specifically, Google remained static with 13.4 billion, while again Microsoft gained 1 percent to 3.5 billion searches, while Yahoo lost 1 percent to 2.4 billion. Interestingly, AOL lost 8 percent of search queries over the previous month.

"Stock Images Do Not Impact Search Engine Rankings" says Matt Cutts

Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts, said in a recent video that using stock images from a stock image website has no impact on rankings.

The question was, “Does using stock photos on your pages have a negative effect on rankings?”

Matt’s answer was very short, he said “no.” There is no positive or negative impact on your organic Web ranking if you use stock imagery versus original imagery.

Of course, if you want to go deeper, images might enhance your content, which may attract more visitors and more links. But, images are currently not a ranking factor for your content, according to Matt Cutts.

Another obvious point is that this is not discussing image search ranking. Typically, you won’t see the same image shown in the image search results. So, having unique images may help there.

Here is the video from Matt: